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How can I easily convert/split/tile every page of an PDF file which is A3/landscape to A4/portrait?

user1251007
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3 Answers3

21

command line solution

  1. Install pdfposter

    sudo apt-get install pdfposter

  2. Use pdfposter

    pdfposter path/to/input.pdf path/to/output_splitted.pdf -m a4 -p 2x1a4

user1251007
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    Very nice. An overlap or page margin would be nice, to accommodate non-printable page borders, but pdfposter doesn't seem to support this without hacking (maybe you can hack it with a fake page size...). My solution to this problem was to print the output PDF slightly scaled down. But then you still have to cut it very precisely. – leemes Aug 25 '14 at 14:00
  • There is a patch adding --overlap-percent option here: https://gitlab.com/pdftools/pdfposter/-/issues/1 – ulidtko Nov 01 '20 at 00:06
  • 10 years later and this is still exactly what I needed. Cheers! – smassey Aug 29 '22 at 11:34
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mutool poster -x 2 input.pdf output.pdf

Installation in Debian 10/Buster:

apt install mupdf-tools

For reordering the pages after splitting, you can use pdftk.

user1338062
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  • Is there a way to make mutool add a margin around the printable area of the page? – Tom Sep 21 '22 at 17:14
0

GUI solution

If the dimension (A4 instead of A3) is not important (as this is not important for viewing the file and can be easily adjusted while printing), you can use PDFsam (open source) which allows to rotate pages.

PDFsam overview

user1251007
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